by Unknown
Eliot collapsed onto the floor beside her. She put her head on his shoulder and he moved his head so that he was combing her hair with his chin. “That was really stupid,” she said, at the same as he said, “That was ridiculous.”
Without raising her head, she ran her fingers over the marks she’d made on his face, kissed each of her fingers and her thumb and touched them to each scratch. Just to be sure she touched his eyelids.
“Did you take something?”
“What?”
“Your eyes . . . I don’t know, maybe you smoked something.”
“No more than usual.” He crossed his heart.
“What do you really do in here?”
“What d’you think?”
“Develop photos, I suppose. Since when, though?”
He shrugged. She took some chalk out of the pocket of her dress. When she offered him a stick of it he looked surprised, but took it and stuck it in his mouth, pretended to smoke it like a cigar while she ate.
•
Azwer gave his notice the day of Eliot’s and Miranda’s Cambridge interviews. He stopped Luc as he was on his way out to meet the twins by the car. Azwer said, “My wife and daughters are afraid. If we stay they will only become more afraid, and then something bad will happen.” His heavy eyebrows lowered and he made some small, involuntary gesture with his hand that was recognisably superstitious, as if the words “God forbid” had flowed into his body.
Luc said, “Two weeks is too short notice for me to find replacements for you and Ezma. And we’ve had the lift looked at.”
Azwer said quickly, heatedly, “Mr. Dufresne, it’s not just the lift—”
Luc put his car keys down on the hall table, and tension pulled him taller. “Then what?”
Azwer kept his eyes fixed on Luc.
Luc looked at Miranda, then lowered his voice and said to Azwer, “Do you need more pay?”
Azwer spread his hands. “We cannot stay.”
Azwer and Ezma didn’t have papers; as far as the government was concerned, Luc was running the Silver House alone. Luc said, “Azwer, listen. Think about it. Where will you work? Where will you go?”
Azwer shrugged. “To London.”
Luc said, “I see,” in tones that patently signalled that he didn’t.
He took Miranda by the shoulders and turned her in the direction of the door.
She didn’t look like a promising interview candidate at all, she knew. All the colour in her face was in her lips, and her dress was still far too big. The back of it gaped around her shoulder blades as if the dress had been designed for someone who had wings. She would have to talk fast and come to surprising conclusions and smile a lot so no one would notice.
•
Miranda’s first interview was an hour and a half after Eliot’s, so she wandered in and out of the entrances to the college’s stone stairwells. She wondered how Eliot’s interview had gone and where he was, but she couldn’t find her phone; she must have left it somewhere. Cambridge was subdued; it wasn’t just the frost and the puffy felt sky, it was the abundance of massive, old stone. And then the bells, which pealed their deep songs at mysterious intervals. Miranda felt as if she was being pressed to the ground beneath a great grey finger. She had a pocketful of onyx chips
(properties of onyx: it helps you hold your emotions steady; side effects of onyx: it is the sooty hand that strangles all your feeling out of you) and she used her teeth to carve tiny, acrid flakes of onyx onto her tongue. She knew how to do it so that it looked as if she was simply biting her nails.
She collided with another girl on her way back into the waiting area outside the interview room. They both held their heads and moaned.
“Oh Lord! You must have the hardest head in all creation,” the girl said.
Miranda waited until she could look at the girl without it hurting, then lifted her gaze. The girl was black, all long legs and platform trainers, clad in grey school uniform. Her head was covered with tiny plaits that had coloured elastic bands tied around the ends, and her eyes were dark and large like drops of rich ink.
There was an awkward silence. Then Miranda held the door open and said, “Let’s try again, you first,” before she remembered that she had been the one going in. The other girl had been leaving.
“Look . . . what’s the time?” the girl said.
Miranda said, “I don’t know,” and looked around for a clock.
The girl looked at the watch on Miranda’s wrist.
“It doesn’t work,” Miranda said, rather than explain about Haitian time. “How have your interviews gone?”
“They haven’t. I mean I haven’t been called yet. I’m not doing it after all. Fuck it. I only wanted to know the time because there’s a train I might be able to catch if I leave right now,” the girl blurted.
“You’re . . . not going to your interviews?”
“No! I can’t be bothered.”
The girl’s hands were shaking. Miranda tried not to stare.
“Er . . . listen, it will be very demoralizing for me if you leave.”
The girl looked Miranda up and down and quietly advised her that she probably had nothing to worry about.
Miranda frowned. “What are you saying? Do I just walk in and say a secret password?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Do you?”
Miranda pushed the question aside with her hand. “It would be a shame not to bother. After you applied and everything. And . . . where do you live?”
“Faversham.”
“Right. So you came all the way up from Faversham—”
“Indeed!” the girl said. “Look . . . what’s your name?”
“Miranda.”
“I’m Ore. Look, Miranda. I’ve already been through all that ‘you’ve already applied and here you are’ stuff in my head. But hear ye, hear ye: only one person from my school’s got in here in the last five years, that’s a very discouraging pie chart to draw, plus I’ve been thinking about my personal statement and there are at least seventeen lies in there and I can’t keep track of them all. Plus I just realised I’m stupid, an actual dunce. I got a C for GCSE maths. It’s very likely that I’ve only been called to interview so they can laugh at me. Anyway thanks for listening, I’m off.”
“Well, I think it’s a terrible waste,” Miranda said, following Ore down the staircase. “And how will you ever know unless you try?”
Ore took Miranda’s hands between both of hers and shook it. “Good luck,” she said. “All the best. Really. I think it’s really nice of you to bother.”
Miranda could see how hard Ore was trying to take full breaths, to be calm. The only thing was to use a strategy of Lily’s.
“I,” said Miranda, “will give you a prize if you stay and do your interviews.”
Ore perched herself on the stair rail and closed her eyes.
“Well,” she said, after a moment, “I’ve never won a prize.”
They walked back upstairs together, arm in shaky arm. Ore wouldn’t let Miranda talk because, she said, she needed silence to get her lies in order.
Miranda thought about Ore throughout her interview, even when it descended into a semi-aggressive debate over her assertion that Thackeray’s Becky Sharp would easily beat Brontë’s Cathy in a fistfight. The only criticism she would have accepted was that she was giving patriarchy precedence over the female consciousness explored in the Gothic. But since that criticism wasn’t offered, she stood her ground. She didn’t remember her interviewers after the fact of her interviews—the professors didn’t have features, they were learnedness dressed up as people and housed in armchairs.
“Well? Where’s my prize?” Ore said, when Miranda came out. There were two others waiting outside now, a boy and a girl, both wearing blazers and silently reading thick books. They looked up when Ore spoke.
“How did it go?” Miranda asked.
“Wonderful. Really unbelievably good.” Cheerfully, Ore mimed stabbing herself. “I
f I don’t get that prize, the day might as well not have happened at all.”
She held her hand out expectantly.
“Alright, here it is,” said Miranda, and laid Ore’s purse on her palm. “You wouldn’t have got very far without it anyway,” she said. “Would you?”
Ore skipped a beat, then said: “I hope you get in. It’ll keep you off the streets, at least.”
She demanded the time of the boy nearest her and rushed down the college steps. The nervousness in her brought an otherwise gawky frame together in concentration—she delayed reaching out to push doors to the very last second, moving towards them as if, Miranda thought, they would slip aside for her or she would pass through them.
•
Since Azwer and Ezma were leaving, Miranda felt she should give their daughters something. Suryaz and Deme would each need a talisman, an object that smelt lovely, or that felt kind to the hand; such things are little suitcases to put sad feelings in so that they can go away by themselves.
Miranda didn’t have to go back to school until after the Christmas holidays, so for Suryaz she spent five nights under her bedroom lamp, making a cloth doll with a seed pearl smile and rose petals for eyes. She slept sparingly and unwillingly. Rest seized her and kept her until she twitched awake two or three hours later.
When Suryaz and Deme came home in the afternoons and sat down in the kitchen for their after-school snacks, Miranda mustered the energy to shuffle downstairs. She poked her head around the kitchen door for a brief but fond sighting of Suryaz, who was invariably a creature of jam, all sticky mouth and gooey ringlets. She thought, Soon I will have something to give you, and you don’t know it yet.
Each night Miranda worked on the doll and then she spent the day in bed, half dreaming of her needle in a circle of white. On the night that Suryaz’s doll was finished, she took her big bottle of attar of roses, unplugged its glass stopper and filled a bowl, then swam Suryaz’s doll in it. When the doll was slack and fat with liquid, she removed it and dropped it on the floor, where it lay beside her with arms and legs spread until the morning, by which time it had dried out.
Deme was harder to think of a gift for—Deme who’d stood on tiptoe in a box in the night, looking at the Alarm button. Deme wouldn’t want a thing that flopped charmingly and had nothing to tell her. When Azwer and Ezma began loading things into Luc’s car, Miranda went to find Deme. “Please come and choose a going-away present for yourself. Anything I have that you like,” she said, feeling shy now under the younger girl’s glossy stare. The girls had become steely since the lift broke down; they seemed full of resolutions not to smile anymore. Deme wouldn’t come without Suryaz, so the three of them stood in Miranda’s room, peering around in the gloom. Miranda covered the face of Lily’s watch with her hand and thought to herself, be giving. She watched Deme’s eyes move from her books to the sticks of chalk that she kept in a Marlboro cigarette box.
“Never smoke,” she told Deme, firmly. Deme put her hand out and pointed at a hairbrush that Lily had given Miranda. It was bone backed, with tiny skulls carved into it. Some of the skulls faced each other and were blended together at the jaw. Miranda had only recently realised that these were the skulls that were kissing. Deme chose that hairbrush, and Miranda wrapped it up in a silk scarf and gave it to her gladly. Suryaz stood by, rocking her new doll in the big pocket of her dress.
Suryaz bowed her head and her curls swung before her closed eyes, her face scrunched as if she was about to describe something and was trying to remember it with exactness and close attention. But she only seemed able to say, “Oh Miranda. Be careful.”
And Deme urged, “It is true. You’re nice, and you haven’t been well. Do be careful.”
Ezma called her daughters from the floor below. Suryaz said something to Deme in Azeri. Deme replied to her in Azeri, then turned a sweet smile on Miranda and dropped a square of lined writing paper onto Miranda’s pillow.
Miranda shook hands with Suryaz. Deme shook hands with Miranda. Each said goodbye.
Miranda stretched, then sat for a while after the noise of their departure had died in her ears. She was feeling fragile and had missed her morning dose, so she took more pills than was customary for her and washed them down with vinegar. She poured rose attar onto her tongue to mask the sourness her drink brought. She knelt down with her neck bowed as though for an axe and ran her perfume-wettened fingers through her hair.
Then she opened Suryaz and Deme’s letter. It was written in a round and extra neat hand that was unmarred by the splotches the fountainpen nib had made in several places.
The letter read:
Dear Miranda Silver,
This house is bigger than you know! There are extra floors, with lots of people on them. They are looking people. They look at you, and they never move. We do not like them. We do not like this house, and we are glad to be going away.
This is the end of our letter.
Yours sincerely,
Deme and Suryaz Kosarzadeh
Miranda folded the letter several times and put it in her pocket. She tried to smile, and managed, but not for long. She took the letter out and read it again. She was thinking things, but she couldn’t understand her thoughts. It wasn’t necessarily about Suryaz and Deme. It was more about the exhaustion of having finished Suryaz’s doll, of having worked her eyes and her nerves for someone different and distant, someone who had lived in a different house from her when she’d thought they were all living in the same house, safe as little fishes in folds of the deep blue sea.
Miranda went down through the trapdoor and curled up in a corner of the indoor bomb shelter. She cried with her face turned into the wall. Lily had told her and Eliot that this house, with their great-grandmother inside it, had escaped the effects of a bomb in 1942, that the houses a short distance away had been torn apart, their roofs whirling away to reveal cakes of brick with savage bites taken out of them. The house was lucky. Or storing its collapse.
To live here without Lily . . . Miranda found that the sadness was far far bigger than her, and it was forcing her back. The wall she leant against had a damp, high temperature to it, like tears on skin.
•
Christmas was dismal. We went to Paris as usual, to stay with our grandparents (Dad’s parents, I mean) on the Île Saint-Louis. There was too much food. There’s always too much food at Christmas, but this time it kept getting stuck in my throat and each bite turned into this choice between eating and breathing, as if you should ever have to choose.
We sat around the table and Miri and I didn’t even try to join in with the conversation that Sylvie, Dad and The Paul were having. I stared at the huge holly and mistletoe wreaths on the wall, and Miri accidentally counted her bites of turkey aloud. “Nine,” she breathed out, and dropped her knife and fork onto her plate with a clatter, and after that no one could think of anything to say for a while.
Miri and I call our grandfather The Paul. He is very wrinkled, quite stooped, smiles amiably and is generally a most excellent and easygoing being. I aim to reach that state of grace by the time I’m his age, calmly putting my tackle box in order or reading the newspaper with seemingly unmitigated attention while my wife gets at me about something. Our grandmother, Sylvie, is not known as The Sylvie. She is the girl who fell in love with a boy who worked in a bakery and had married him by the time his patisserie P. M. Dufresne had become so notable that fashionable magazines recommended it.
Miri told me that Sylvie had once showed her a pristine 1969 copy of French Vogue, with a small piece about P. M. Dufresne. Alongside the piece was a photograph of some intimidatingly fashionable creatures tripping gaily in through the shop door. Sylvie only let Miri see the piece for a couple of seconds, then whisked it away, saying, “Sticky fingers. Besides, you are not able to understand it.”
Sylvie is still vexed because we all tried to learn French but had to stop because Lily couldn’t get the hang of it and would substitute any word she couldn’t recall with �
�l’oignon” and then she’d wave her hands and laugh. When Dad got annoyed with her (which he did quietly, but curtly) her face fell a million feet and she’d call herself an ignoramus until we couldn’t take it anymore and demanded that the lessons stop. But I doubt it was just the thing with the French lessons that came between Lily and Sylvie; there’s also the fact of Sylvie being impeccable. Lily was a bunch of crumpled pockets and Sylvie is a black dress, perfumed scarves, iron posture and whatever else turns a person into an atmosphere. Sylvie doesn’t look capable of getting involved with a messy pastry.
Miri was like a mini-Sylvie, but she hadn’t always been. I can’t remember when she stopped wearing jeans and jumpers and skirts and started with the black and the severe outlines (why did she start?) but I do remember Lily finding the change hilarious for months, and I also remember being embarrassed to have to be seen outdoors with Miri until I realised that no one seemed to think that her dress sense was odd. Aside from infrequent comments
(“Cheer up, love,” or “It’s not Hallo’ween”),
no one wondered why a teenager was dressed up as a chic governess. Sylvie approved of Miri, even at the same time as she was confused by her. “It’s a style at least,” she said, and took off her rope of pearls and looped them around Miri’s neck. “Perhaps when you are my age you will have to turn to short skirts and mini-dresses, just for something different.” Then Sylvie turned to me. “You dress exactly as if you don’t care, but there is some artfulness to it; your colours balance each other.”